Talk: Vagrant

I had a breakneck ramble over at Belfast Ruby last night on getting started with Vagrant; the discussion afterwards was fanastic perspective on how we're approaching virtualisation in our working environments and I'd thought I'd write up a few of the talking points that stuck in my head afterwards.

A Razor for Open Source

If I was a community manager for a large open source project, distributing reference VMs for the project would be high on my list. Its not just a case of weeding out red herrings from misconfigured boxes, being able to be very explicit about the matrix of operating systems, packages and versions you support is a strong triage for a large backlog.

On this, I mentioned a Vagrantfile being distributed by the Rails team during the 4.0.0 beta which I lost track of. @chrismcg rightly pointed this is now available as it own repo

The One True Jenkins

At the moment, the user community base box list presents good starting points to build on but we're missing the community-driven equivolent of Rightscale marketplace for common applications. There are boxes out there for things like Jenkins or Travis, but there are several for each application with low discoverability. There's a missing hub that could collate those independant efforts and provide curation.

Virtualisation & SOA

Docker was another project that got a mention, which I'm really intriged by. Deploying wrapped applications as a service is a really neat idea. As the current generation of web applications ( and frameworks ) reach maturity the discourse has turned towards optimisation and decomposition into small, optimised services. Its a really obvious evolution that common cases become shippable products.

Slides, etc

If you're curious the slides are available here, with the source for the examples on GitHub. I've had a few people asking me the app I used for the presentation, it is Reveal.js which I highly recommend.